• Rupture

When I was a baby doctor who only shaved once a week, I used to give a talk entitled Child Protection. The audience invariably thought that this was going to be a gentle guide to helmets and mouthguards and were distinctly uncomfortable when my starting sentence was ‘As you know, youth sport is a magnet for paedophiles’. The fact that this was in 1994, in the wake of the Hickson swimming scandal, shows just how long it has taken some sports to wake up to the problem. Safeguarding athletes from exploitation and abuse should be the no. 1 priority for everyone involved in sport.

However, no. 2 on our priority list should be safeguarding athletes from ignorance, a problem that has frustrated sports physicians since the dawn of time.

From the moment that an athlete ruptures an ACL, their knee is doomed. You can speed up the rate of deterioration by encouraging the athlete to return to the activity that caused the injury in …